As we move into the last quarter of this inaugural GPA year, the students in my class are embarking on one of the most challenging topics of the year: public speaking. We’ll be working toward a straightforward (but certainly not simple) goal: a five-minute speech.

“Five minutes?!” was a fairly common refrain. “There’s no way I can give a speech that long!”

A few students reacted with incredulity of a different nature: “Only five minutes?!”

Our preparation toward the seemingly daunting goal will roughly follow the template we established today. We began with a writing prompted that served as the basis for the rest of the day: “How was your spring break? What was the best part of it? What would you relive if you could? Why?”

After students wrote their responses, they had short conversations to share their ideas. (A secondary focus this quarter is social/conversational skills — we’ll be talking all quarter.) From there, they used rock/paper/scissors to determine who from each table would go first.

“Go first, Mr. Scott? In what?”

“The first speech!” Anxiety washed over several faces until I explained it was only a one-minute speech, and their audience would be limited to their tables. After a short time to prepare for the modified topic (“Make an argument that your spring break, no matter what you did, was the best imaginable spring break”), students took turns giving their short speeches to their groups. Listeners were to pay attention to four different elements depending on which speaker was presenting:

Use of fillers and repeated words/phrases

• Eye contact
• Organization
• Clear speaking

After each speech, the three audience members gave a bit of feedback on the element in question. Once all four group members completed their speech, we used Class Dojo to choose randomly one student.

“You’re the class winner!” I exclaimed.

“What did I win?”

“The privilege of giving your speech to the whole class!”

After the student gave her short presentation (Class Dojo chose only girls for some reason), I explained that what we’d just done would serve as something of a template for most of the lessons for the next couple of weeks. We’ll have mini-lessons on a number of topics including but not limited to:

• Filler words
• Eye contact
• SPS (Specific purpose statement)
• Gestures
• Engaging the crowd
• Speaking loudly and clearly
• Confidence
• Effective notes for a speech

Finally, we’ll end the quarter by using all the discussions we’ve been having as inspiration for our speeches.

It will be a busy quarter, but we’re finishing the year with a challenge because that’s what we do at GPA.

From class website update.